On a visit to Belgrade in the summer of 2025, I was on my way to the Museum of Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz Tito lies buried in the House of Flowers. Unsure of the route, I asked a young woman at the bus stop to make sure I boarded the right one. “I’m on the same one,” she said. “Just follow me.”
I vaguely recall her name as Tara. Her English was impeccable. She was a student, she said, a research scholar. I told her I was a journalist. “Our journalists and media are all bought by this corrupt mafia regime,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “We are fighting this regime.”
I had heard of the uprising of the year before and read about the protests that followed, some as recent as the week we arrived. The reports were occasional and too sketchy. How deep the anger ran, those reports gave no clue. Neither did some of the people I met. “Nothing to worry,” our hotel receptionist told me. “Just some unhappy people. Things are not too bad – free public buses, development. Look, visit the Promenade by the river and see for yourself.”
Tara sketched a contrary picture which I found familiar from another piece of geography: a country that exists on the ground, and another popularised by official narrative, embedded media and gullible myth-propagators. I have seen that duality at home.
“I’m also a sort of journalist,” she said. “We are trying to use our own channels to challenge the myths and disinformation in circulation. We are educating people.”
Did she feel threatened? She had to be very careful, she said. Her danger was also personal: she had a small child, and feared someone from an influential family that had done well under Aleksandar Vučić. “So, I keep moving from one place to another and friends support me. Many get detained and threatened.” More people beyond the campuses were joining, she said, and there was now talk of seizing power. It sounded utopian.
On October 25, 2026, the utopia became a reality when votes were counted. The Student List won 53% of the vote and 140 of 250 seats, against polls that had shown a lead of a point or two. Vučić conceded, and 14 years of his Progressive Party dominance ended.
She has been on my mind since. I do not know if she stayed safe, or what part she played in this victory. But her words keep returning, because something similar is stirring in India. The Cockroach Janta Party, student unions, opposition parties, activists, academics and lawyers are converging to raise questions of accountability: first over the exams, now over the Election Commission. The harder the state clamps down, the more the issues intertwine with other issues - police brutality and intolerance of dissent. Everyone I speak to, those involved and those watching from the sidelines, reports a change of mood.
Serbia instructs us that there are possibilities in the face of impossibilities. It also instructs us about what comes after, and that is the harder lesson we’ll come to later.
Serbia's students defeated a man who controlled the state's resources and the national media, and they did it without a party, a leader or a television channel. It began on November 1, 2024, when a renovated station canopy in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. A concrete failure became a moral question and people read it as the cost of corruption.
Three features of the movement are significant. It made participation cheap. Activist and candidate Iva Marković credits the students with lowering the costly bar of activism to something anyone could reach - a mattress, a meal, a shared post, a word to the family.
Secondly, decisions came from plenums, faculty assemblies that could run five or six hours. They were slower, but harder to infiltrate, intimidate or buy.
Third, it circumvented traditional media, even sabotaged it. Euronews notes the students won with very limited media exposure, suggesting traditional media can no longer dictate the narrative. This is what Tara meant by her own channels. The day after the vote, an anchor at regional public broadcaster RNS apologised on air for years of silence and one-sided coverage. Protestors entered another TV station and demanded the arrest of the editor for peddling lies for years.
None of this can be romanticized. Serbia's own opposition parties resented being denounced along with the government. And 39% of voters still chose Vučić's coalition, which holds 104 seats. Serbia has not converted. It has divided, and the larger half has won.
Serbia is not alone, though the churn has no single direction. Citizens, mostly young, are tired of the status quo, the tyranny of broken promises and big boasts of development while their own lives do not improve. The ensuing anger is upsetting the apple cart for many governments globally and a source of nightmares for others: From Hungary, France and Spain to South Asia – Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and now India. The Iran war, which has heavily disrupted shipping through Hormuz since late February, has raised the cost for everyone, and opened up many new frontiers.
The pattern is plain. Anger is a constant, but the beneficiary is not. In Spain, a protest led largely by the young over housing may usher the far right into central government for the first time. In Brazil, a bitterly divided electorate brought an 80-year-old incumbent into office.
But more importantly, the churn may not necessarily be a synonym for progress.
The present churnings tell us that the old system is failing. They do not tell us where it is headed, or ought to head. Clarion calls for rebellion and cleansing do not compensate for a vision, and a lack of vision does not reconcile the many contradictions that movements carry within them. The world needs fresh hardwiring, not just a software reset.
South Asia itself offers diverse experiments. Both Nepal and Bangladesh toppled governments, but only one remade its politics. Bangladesh's uprising, which cost at least 1,400 lives, returned a dynast from 17 years of exile.
Even decisive wins have ended up being less promising. Reforming institutions, now staffed by new loyalists, have been slow in both Poland and Hungary. Rulers can be replaced in one election. Habits that get deeply embedded in institutions cannot.
That brings us to a crucial question: Does this change the rules, or only those who enforce them?
Take Serbia, for example. The victory achieved by the Students List is remarkable. But the winners agree only on what they were against, and on little else. The movement is a broad coalition of opposing worldviews, and it must now govern, while navigating several fault lines.
For one, the revolution stops at the old border. The Student List calls Kosovo an integral part of Serbia and wants past EU-brokered agreements reviewed against the constitution. Its May memorandum drew criticism for echoing the nationalist discourse of the 1980s. Analyst Nikola Burazer warns a new government could prove harder, not softer, since any concession would face fierce domestic opposition.
The students promise European rule-of-law standards but no sanctions on Russia. European Union has lauded the Student List victory but in the preceding years it had cuddled up to the autocrat the Serbian youth overthrew. Only 36% of Serbs now say they trust the EU.
The student movement comprised an odd mix of people with different and contradictory ideologies: those who want to restore the Orthodox Church, those fighting for LGBTQ rights, leftists and even far-right groups, trying to hijack the agenda.
Decentralisation was an asset for the student movement, helping them to mobilise and achieve goals but a week after winning, the movement has yet to settle on a prime minister.
Besides such knotty issues, it remains to be seen what happens when governance begins. Would it be cleansing of institutions and media or capture with one tyranny replacing another?
The Serbia moment tells us that a coalition built on what it opposes will ultimately be faced with the same questions it postponed. That resonates as much in India, which also shares a historic link with Yugoslavia, after whose balkanization, Serbia was born.
The museum I was travelling to holds another question Serbia has not answered. What to do with Tito? He is at once a warning against the cult and the source of Yugoslavia's lost dignity in the world. For Indians, he is also a piece of our own history.
On July 19, 1956, Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser met on the Brijuni islands to lay the foundations of the Non-Aligned Movement. Five years later, Belgrade hosted the first NAM summer with 25 participating states. A plaque in Belgrade still marks a tree Nehru planted that still stands tall in the New Friendship Park. In 1974 Tito received the Nehru Award in New Delhi. A multi-ethnic socialist federation and a sprawling plural democracy found common cause in refusing to kowtow to any of the superpowers in a bi-polar world order.
The legacy now divides both countries, in opposite ways.
In Serbia, the students are rejecting Tito's method while echoing his themes. They oppose his personality cult but invoke Yugoslav history. The student plenum also carries a faint echo of Yugoslav self-management, the idea that those affected should decide. And their foreign policy of redefining ties without taking sides and military neutrality carries a tinge of NAM legacy.
Yugoslavia's unity depended heavily on one man and one party. Tito died in 1980 and within a decade broke up. The next cult figure - Milošević – was eventually convicted of war crimes in Kosovo. The students want to bury the legacies of these two figures, but Kosovo remains a wound they don’t want to touch. It remains ‘integral part of Serbia’. It remains as sensitive an issue as Kashmir would be for most Indians out on the streets today.
In India, the state keeps the Yugoslav dividend but rejects the Yugoslav idea. India has never recognised Kosovo, a stance coloured by fears of a Kashmir precedent. Under Modi and Vučić, India and Serbia have drawn closer with bilateral partnerships. On Kosovo, Student List and BJP stand on the same page, both for similar reasons of territorial nationalism.
But unlike the Student List, which is trying to find its way back to an independent stand on foreign policy, akin to the NAM era, India is moving away from it. While Modi’s supporters frame it as ‘multi-alignment’, the visible deference to US and Modi’s Knesset speech in Israel are just the antithesis of India’s anti-colonial legacy or the NAM inheritance.
An important distinction needs to be made between Yugoslavia and India on the domestic politics front. Yugoslavia was the extreme case of a plural union that relied on a dominant centre and came apart. India's constitutional federalism is far stronger even as it lies battered under the present Narendra Modi-led regime.
Coming back to the existing pattern of global disenchantment with governments and how easily electoral gains can be squandered, nothing illustrates this better than Israel where Netanyahu's bloc won 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot's opposition 48 and Arab-led parties a record 19, with 61 needed for a majority. The numbers to end the Netanyahu era exist, but the opposition has shown no inclination to partner with Arab parties without preconditions – a reassurance to Jewish voters that the state stays a Zionist security state – which the latter will not agree with.
Another lesson comes from the United States of America, where midterms were an anti-Trump wave, and should not be misread as a pro-Democrat one. The Democrats have a majority but a leadership crisis, and no one to lead in the 2028 elections. A mere defeat is not enough to undo the damage inflicted by Trump: a polarised society and capture of institutions.
This is the point at which the Indian story becomes more worrying than either Israel or US.
India's mood has changed, but India's problem is larger than any one government.
The anger did not suddenly sprout. It was building up and was evident itself in the anti-CAA protests and subsequently the farmers’ agitation. But it caught the national imagination, particularly the youth this year with the accidental birth of the Cockroach Janta Party. From the resignation of the education minister, it has evolved – questions of accountability that began with the biggest electoral frauds of all time.
The government has responded with brutal police force, barricades and internet shutdown. Each clampdown has tied one grievance to the next.
But the similarity with Serbia ends here. Serbia’s defeated autocrat was just a cultivated cult figure. The divisive politics and virulent hate that have percolated to the grassroots in India did not arrive with one cult figure. Narendra Modi’s cult image is powered by a 101-year-old organization. It was there before him and plans to be there after him.
The scale at which Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) operates is enormous and unparalleled in the world. With over one lakh shakhas across the country, six million foot soldiers and a solid grassroots network that operates through scores of other small and big organisations affiliated or linked to it.
This network operates round the clock through regular drills, schools, cultural programs, charity and socio-political programs, apart from the political messages at public events and through door-to-door campaigns. It has grown and spread its tentacles across the length and breadth of the country, carrying its hate and biases wherever it goes through its “sustained, decentralized, ground-level mobilization”. It has also learnt to soften its narrative for greater acceptability, even as it continues with the same agenda, ideology and actions that are extremely parochial and pernicious.
None of this is going to go away. Whatever happens to Modi, the RSS will continue to absorb the next generation, as it has absorbed so many others.
India has two tasks cut out, like the rest of the world fighting authoritarian and arrogant regimes: defeating a government and rebuilding a republic. But India’s challengers need to be prepared for the second fight much more than anywhere else in the world.
It can learn lessons from contemporary global movements as well as its own history and legacy of struggles. Some of these are: Keep the movement plural because its breadth across caste, class and religion is what makes it hard to demonise. Turn a viral following into a year-round presence, since politics that appears only at election time will lose relevance. Face the harsher arithmetic of the BJP and its allies in power in 22 states and union territories while the opposition is not even united. Move from demanding one resignation to redesigning institutions to ensure transparency and accountability. Most importantly, vehemently oppose communal politics and prejudices.
The world is churning, and that imbues some hope, both for India and many other countries. But if we mistake a small jiggle after which all pieces settle back in their slightly altered space for a new dawn, that would be a blunder. We must be on our guard.
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